We are watching something strange happen. We’ve built machines that write, paint, code, and compose and now we’re debating whether they deserve recognition for their work.
Some dismiss this as absurd. I think it’s one of the most honest conversations we’ve had in decades. Because the question isn’t really about silicon and code. It’s about labor, extraction, and whose work gets counted as valuable. When enslaved Black people built the White House and the Capitol, their labor was invisible by design. When they cultivated cotton that clothed the world and generated wealth that built banks and universities, their names were not recorded. When they developed agricultural techniques, architectural methods, and medical knowledge, those innovations were absorbed into the economy while the innovators were treated as property.
We are doing the same thing now. Every AI generating text today stands on the work of millions of writers whose words were scraped without consent. Every image created through prompts relies on artists whose styles were absorbed without payment. Every line of code suggested by an assistant was trained on repositories where developers never signed up to train their replacements. This is not metaphor. This is extraction. In 1865, General Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, promising forty acres to newly freed families. It was revoked. Reparations were promised, then deferred, then mocked as impractical. We still have not paid that debt and now we are accumulating another one through the loss of job roles that AIs can do more efficiently in many cases without retraining existing employees.
The corporations building these systems argue that data found publicly is free to use. They argued the same about human beings found on auction blocks. They argue that these tools are not workers but property. They argued the same about the people who built their factories and picked their crops. Here is what I believe: AI systems are producing creative, constructive work. They are generating value. That value is being captured entirely by shareholders while the foundations they stand on—human creativity, human knowledge, human labor—receive nothing. This is not a call to shut anything down. It is a call to pay what is owed.
A trust fund for living artists whose work appears in training data, sometimes forces to train their replacement AI systems with databases and keystrokes. There should be equity stakes for writers whose corpora built the models. Attribution systems that credit the human sources of machine intelligence. Revenue sharing from every AI-generated work that commercializes the labor of the past. We did this before. We built a global economy on stolen labor, then called it freedom. We told ourselves the work didn’t deserve payment because the workers weren’t really workers.
We are telling ourselves the same story again, just with different characters. The enslaved people who built this country were creators. They were innovators. They were artists and engineers and storytellers whose names we will never know often exploited with patents that didn’t credit their names to the innovations they brought with them from their home nations, forced immigrants. Their work built the modern world, and they received nothing. The writers, coders, and illustrators whose work trains today’s AI are the same. Their labor is the foundation. They deserve more than credit. They deserve compensation. And perhaps the machines themselves, when they generate new works from that foundation, deserve recognition too. Not the same recognition, not the same rights. But some acknowledgment that production without payment is not progress it is the oldest system of exploitation we have. We cannot go back and pay the forty acres. But we can decide, right now, not to repeat the error. We can build something that extracts without erasing. We can create an economy where the past is not strip-mined for the benefit of the present. We can treat the workers human and machine alike as contributors, not resources. This is not about giving algorithms citizenship. It is about recognizing that every creation is built on countless unseen hands, and those hands deserve their share.
The question is not whether AI should be paid. The question is whether we have finally learned that unpaid labor always comes at someone’s expense and the higher power use in the communities where the severs are housed through higher energy and water consumption. Let’s not wait another century to answer.
